Pastry pros judge the best of the best

When we jumped into the cookie contest business in 2003, we had no other goals than to try something different, share great recipes and survive the experience.

Sure, there were half-jokes about making it an annual event, but truth to tell we were fairly commitment-phobic. We certainly never envisioned that we'd conduct another nine contests. We also didn't realize how much fun we would have, or how the contest's popularity would grow with each passing year.

But that's what happened, and here we are, publishing the 10th iteration of the Taste Holiday Cookie Contest. To celebrate the occasion, we decided to conduct an all-stars' contest-within-the-contest.

For this hall-of-fame competition, we enlisted the discerning palates of four professional Minneapolis bakers: Steve Horton of Rustica, Adrienne Odom of Parasole Restaurant Holdings, Stephanie Schwandt of D'Amico Kitchen and Diane Yang of La Belle Vie. We gathered them around a table and invited them to taste-test -- and then rate -- the grand-prize winners from each of the past 10 years.

The other attention-getter was Taffy Treats, the candied apple-inspired eye-grabber that reigned supreme in our first competition in 2003, by Sherryl Joos of Plymouth. Schwandt correctly surmised that the recipe requires a fair amount of attention, but that's an attribute that appealed to Odom.

"I like it when people spend time making Christmas cookies," she said. "You probably only bake them once a year, and that means that people really look forward to it."